A story has just broken in the Guardian that words simply cannot describe.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
The song Rule Britannia goes 'Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves, Britons never never shall be slaves.'
Our Naval prowess was certainly on show at the Jubilee pageant yesterday. Unfortunately we didn't quite live up to the bit about never being slaves
The Tory government has run into controversy this year over their 'workfare' scheme that requires young unemployed people to offer their labour to private companies for free after a certain length of time on the dole.
That was controversial enough and the policy was scaled back after some of the companies involved in it felt the heat and backed out of it.
However this simply beggars belief.
30 unemployed, unpaid jobseekers and 50 more people on the apprentice wage of £2.60 an hour (not much more than $4) were ordered to help provide security for the river pageant for Queen Elizabeth's Jubilee celebrations, as a flotilla of 1000 boats made its way down the Thames.
Not only that, but in a shocking twist of cruelty eerily reminiscent of feudal times they were made to spend the night under London Bridge. The past few days have seen some of the coldest June weather on record.
We all got off the coach and we were stranded on the side of the road for 20 minutes until they came back and told us all to follow them," she said. "We followed them under London Bridge and that's where they told us to camp out for the night … It was raining and freezing."
A 30-year-old steward told the Guardian that the conditions under the bridge were "cold and wet and we were told to get our head down [to sleep]". He said that it was impossible to pitch a tent because of the concrete floor
The woman said they were woken at 5.30am and supplied with boots, combat trousers and polo shirts. She said: "They had told the ladies we were getting ready in a minibus around the corner and I went to the minibus and they had failed to open it so it was locked. I waited around to find someone to unlock it, and all of the other girls were coming down trying to get ready and no one was bothering to come down to unlock [it], so some of us, including me, were getting undressed in public in the freezing cold and rain." The men are understood to have changed under the bridge.
It's not often I feel ashamed of my country but tonight is one of those times. Bloody hell, even convicted murderers, terrorists, rapists and peadophiles are treated better than this. Even they keep their right to shelter, their right to toilet access and their right to food and water.
No doubt the welfare secretary Iain Duncan Smith who is the architect of these slave labour schemes is currently being briefed about what sort of carefully-spun response to give to this, however I'd like to see anyone try to defend this.
The government behind this is the government that just trashed its poll ratings by cutting the top rate of income tax. I hope this story is spread far and wide over the coming days and people can see the savage inequalities that blight our society in all their glory. As for the people behind this scheme, or anyone trying to defend it, well' scum' is just too nice a word for them and hope, though don't expect, that they will face the conequences of it.